Hi Larry and others on Musicnet:
I was quite amused when Ben talked about "Money" as an '80s hit but maybe
it was a slip of the key. This got me thinking about my first experience
with a remake. The song was "Love Letters in the Sand" which was a huge
hit for Pat Boone when I was in high school. I was quite amused to
discover a bit later that it was a remake of a '20s song. As Shakespeare
observed - and others before him - "There is nothing new under the sun."
As we examine the cycling of ideas in our beloved car hobby, some of the
"newest" ideas are in fact quite old. Turbocharging seems to be giving way
to supercharging. Of course supercharging is a very old idea going back to
WWI and turbocharging to WWII. In automotive applications, superchargers
were common in the '20s and '30s on cars and motorcycles. They then found
favor in the '50s and '60s on some American production cars - Kaiser in '54
and Studebaker on Avanti - and were used quite extensively for LBCs (Judson
and others) from the early '50s.
Fuel injection was used by racers and hotrodders in the '50s and was
introduced on production cars by Chevrolet in '57 and Chrysler in '59.
Turbocharging was introduced by Oldsmobile on the Jetfire in '62 and
Corvair on the Monza Spyder in the same year. Corvair continued turbos
until '67 but their use disappeared until Chrysler and Renault rediscovered
them in the '80s. Incidentally, Renault introduced the first intercooler
on a production car with the Fuego, in '82, a car which was capable of
fabulous performance from its sub-1500 engine. Volvo was the first car to
brag about the intercooler by placing advertising on its trunk lid.
It is really amusing to see the reactions of younger people to innovation
in automobiles. I still remember a former student who was blown away by my
'66 Cadillac convertible while I was driving him home after a rehearsal.
He said, "Wow, this car has electric windows. I didn't think anything this
old had modern stuff like that". I then pointed out some of the "modern
stuff" in my old car. He was flabbergasted at things like power seats,
power antenna, power door locks, climate control, autodimmer, twilight
sentinel, power vent windows and other stuff which he had never seen
before. This was in 1995.
In fact he had never heard of a car with autodimmer, twilight sentinel and
climate control before. When I mentioned that the car also has heated
seats he knew about those and didn't think that was too remarkable. His
parents own a Volvo.
The point of the whole thing is that man is truly doomed to live his whole
life without much recourse to or interest in history. Each generation will
determine what is important and who was significant, so that "Man/Woman of
the Century", "Most signiicant .......you fill in the blanks" will only
have significance to those who experienced them first hand. The Boomer
generation has already claimed an inordinate amount of "Most significants"
and as it dies off those significances will die too.
John McEwen
>Benjamin Ruset wrote:
>> > I wasn't saying that they songs may or may not have been remakes.
>>When "Mony,
>> Mony" and other assorted 80s pop is "oldies" then.... heh, like I said
>>-- it's
>> time to increase the fiber in my diet! =)
>>
>> BEN RUSET - mailto:bruset@monmouth.com
>
>-- 80's? 80's?
>
>Larry Dickstein Kansas City, MO
>'58 Bugeye, '67 BJ 8, '67 MGB V8
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